1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to a method of electrically connecting a wiring member to a plurality of electrodes which respectively correspond to a plurality of recording elements of a recording head.
2. Discussion of Related Art
A recording head of a recording head unit generally includes an actuator unit having a plurality of individual electrodes which are provided to correspond respectively to a plurality of recording elements. The actuator unit is arranged such that, when an operating signal is supplied to selected one or ones of the plurality of individual electrodes, one or ones of the plurality of recording elements corresponding to the selected one or ones of the individual electrodes is/are operated to perform recording of suitable images, characters, etc., on a recording medium. As one example of such an actuator unit, a piezoelectric actuator is disclosed in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0112298 A1 corresponding to JP-A-2003-69103 (FIGS. 2 and 3, in particular), for instance. The piezoelectric actuator includes a plurality of tabular piezoelectric elements and a plurality of electrodes (signal electrodes) which respectively correspond to the plurality of piezoelectric elements.
To the plurality of electrodes of such a piezoelectric actuator, there is connected, in the following manner, a wiring member such as a flexible printed wiring board which includes a plurality of conductive leads each having a wire portion and a terminal portion and on which is formed a predetermined wiring pattern constituted by the conductive leads. (Because the flexible printed wiring board may be referred to as a flexible printed circuit, the flexible printed wiring board may be referred to as “FPC” in the following description.) Namely, a convex conductive bump is initially formed on a surface of each terminal portion by using a conductive solder as a bonding agent (e.g., Sn—Pb alloy). Then, the terminal portions of the wiring member and the electrodes are respectively bonded to one another via the respective conductive bumps by heating and melting the bumps with the bumps being pressed onto the respective electrodes with a predetermined load.